Interview by Matthew Backhouse - in Craccum Issue 05, 2007

Random patterns are unfolding as colours collide on-screen. Shifting, bubbling images from an oil projector grow and fade like cells dividing. Lines dart across the screen for split seconds, evolving and disappearing. And all the while an unsettling cacophony is mounting. Low-frequency rumblings seethe under the surface. Sheets of noise are punctuated by guttural stabs of feedback. Occasionally a sustained, piercing screech emerges as the images on-screen change pace: Sam Hamilton is running the neck of his guitar against the projector reel, breaking down the barriers between the production of sound and vision. This is an event. This is noise. This is art. And it’s happening right here in Auckland.

Sam Hamilton’s performance of the multimedia work Transubstantiation Loops isn’t an anomaly. Auckland has an growing community of artists who are committed to exploring the possibilities of sound, and interdisciplinary media events like this are taking place almost every week.

Hamilton is one of the driving forces behind Auckland’s small but incredibly motivated sound art community. As well as performing solo and in various ensembles, Hamilton runs an email list promoting experimental audio events. Many of these events have been organised by Hamilton himself, including the annual Alleluya Noise Festival in St Kevins Arcade, and Vitamin S, a weekly improvisational meeting held at the Wine Cellar every Monday.

“You have to realise it’s not commercially viable in the slightest,” says Hamilton, “so you don’t get events promoters, which means you have to do everything yourself. I like this music, so I organise shows where I can listen to it and make it.”

The lack of commercial interests is in no way a constraint to Hamilton and his peers. In fact, the Auckland sound art community seems to thrive on its own independence.

“It means that we are free to dictate the way we are presented in the public domain – we're not being forced to adhere to any certain image or attitude in order to sell our products,” comments Hamilton.

“It’s about freedom, the freedom to make the music we like, in the way we like it, where we like it, with whom we like. We don’t have to give a fuck about what anyone else thinks, and we get the satisfaction of having the independence and control of our resources.”

This freedom is reflected in the wide variety of outlets for experimental audio artists in Auckland. As well as the Alleluya Noise Festival, there are two major experimental music festivals in Auckland every year: the Alt Music and Version festivals. Sam Hamilton also curates FPS, an interdisciplinary festival exploring sound and cinema, with Phil Dadson.

The local sound art community is able to stay informed about these and other events through Hamilton’s Tumbling Strain mailing list, as well as a discussion list provided by the Audio Foundation, a Charitable Trust dedicated to supporting innovative and experimental audio culture in New Zealand.

Auckland’s sound artists are also fortunate to have access to several supportive venues, including the Wine Cellar and Artspace. “Without a place where people can go to hear your music and interact with other musicians, there would be no community or scene,” says Hamilton. “Venues and spaces that host events are essential to almost all musical cultures. The evidence is there at all major or minor music scenes around the world. There’s almost always a central point where it all happens: CBGBs, Berlin squats, the village square, the Arc [in Dunedin], and the Wine Cellar in Auckland.”

While access to venues is important to the scene, distributing recorded material is much more problematic. “I think it’s important to realise that it’s pointless trying to match the standards of distribution laid out by major music corporations,” says Hamilton. “Even [established experimental music] labels like Touch don’t function to the commercial level of major labels. But they’re not run to make money. They’re run because the people running them are passionate about getting this music heard.”

Rather than trying to establish recording contacts with the few labels interested in experimental music, Auckland sound artists prefer to record and distribute their music themselves. “CD-Rs and other recorded products are more functional items for communication,” says Hamilton. “I send CD-Rs to people and artists I’m interested in, but I don’t think its important to worry about getting it distributed.”

The problem of distribution extends far beyond record labels. There are no longer any independent record stores in Auckland that stock experimental audio releases. “It is difficult that there isn’t anywhere you can see this stuff for sale,” says Hamilton. “All the good record stores have vanished from Auckland because of high rents.”

To compensate for the lack of retail outlets, Auckland’s sound artists have established informal distribution networks that rely on live events and the internet. Sam Hamilton is hoping to improve this situation somewhat. “I’m currently planning on setting up a small cabinet in the Wine Cellar to permanently stock interesting experimental music from NZ,” says Hamilton.

The problems with promoting and distributing experimental music become apparent when you first attend a sound art event – the music itself is even more difficult than the challenges the musicians face. Single pieces can last up to an hour, the physicality of the sound can be overpowering, sonic events can seem unsettlingly alien, and many artists pay scant regard to conventional notions of melody, structure and song-craft. To the untrained ear, it’s nothing but noise.

This radical approach to music extends from a critical appraisal of the social and aesthetic functions of music and sound. For most people, music is entertainment: a temporary indulgence, a lubricant for social interaction. But for Hamilton and his peers, sound is art. It’s about listening: engaging with the environment and interacting with aural stimuli. It’s about music as sound, and sound as possibility. And for Auckland’s experimental sound artists, the possibilities are endless.

“It’s funny, everyone on earth relies on hearing to even stand up straight without falling over,” says Hamilton, “so we are subconsciously used to using our listening in complex and diverse ways for a broad number of applications. This requires a certain amount of openness to simply listening. Yet most people you meet have extremely, extremely narrow tastes in music and have the attitude that you only listen when it’s music you’re listening to.”

Hamilton is opposed to such narrow attitudes, and he is rightfully sceptical about assigning a genre to his own artistic output. “Generally I try to avoid labels/genre categorisation,” says Hamilton, “as it’s a treacherously ambiguous double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s handy for understanding and explaining the complex web of musical directions – methods and aesthetics tie together a particular musical group. On the other hand, categorisation is like trying to contain something that is essentially trying to break free of musical chains that restrict it from expression.

“I don’t consider my musical practice on the whole to fit within the rigours of any one particular musical camp. Some [of my work] can clearly be placed within a defined classified musical aesthetic, but to say ‘that’s what my music sounds like’ is like saying that because an artist paints a blue painting one day, the primary focus of the painter is the colour blue.”

Exploring the possibilities of sound beyond the constraints of genre categorisation is the focus of many of Auckland’s sound artists, like Rosy Parlane, Nigel Wright, Lovely Midget, and Hamilton himself. “The more open a field of music is, the more it is open to chance and diversity,” says Hamilton. “The result is a complete plethora of musical directions and aesthetics.”

“Basically I think it boils down to openness, the willingness to listen to and enjoy a wide range of [music]. Many artists that I know, despite appearing to be in a single musical camp, are often extremely broad in their taste. This means you can draw your influences from a wide range of places: PowerBook experimentalism, Norwegian folk, gamelan, death metal or tropical insects.

“Despite the world’s attempts to categorise and contain these musical expressions into defined boxes, the cross-pollination of musical expression is too complex and interwoven to come close to showing how things really are. All of these forms are much more interrelated than some would like to think, and that’s a really healthy thing for music, I think.”

Given that experimental sound art lends itself to transcending genre limitations, it comes as no surprise that many of Auckland’s sound artists use both traditional pop instrumentation (guitars, keyboards, and vocals) and equipment more commonly associated with electronica (laptops, samplers and tape loop machines). Despite this, sound art tends to attract musicians and listeners who are more at home with avant-rock than electronica.

“Musical openness is of course confined to availability and migration,” comments Hamilton. “NZ seemed to have a lot of communication and influx of free jazz and post-rock/avant-rock from America, and I think those roots run deeper possibly than electronica.

“The aesthetic templates of post-rock and free jazz are much more open-ended than electronica as an entity, and that template is much more easily transferred to a number of different applications. I feel electronica has moved towards being much more defined, while free jazz and rock were moving towards ultra in-definability.”

To the casual listener, Hamilton’s feedback drones and tape loop manipulations seem to having nothing to do with jazz. But Hamilton asserts that the possibilities opened up by improvisation and experimentation are far more important than the aesthetic experience of jazz.

“There’s a famous quote: ‘jazz is dead’. The truth is that jazz changed and grew into something else. I don’t think all these ‘jazz’ bands around today are playing jazz – they’re living out the empty carcass of a musical structure. The real jazz lives on through the influence of things that most people would never consider jazz. I first got introduced to jazz music through Sonic Youth, as they named John Coltrane as an influence.”

The transference of influences from artist to artist is integral to what Hamilton calls “musical cross-pollination.” Of course this cross-pollination is not only occurring in Auckland, but around the world. “There are major similarities between [the Auckland scene] and the scenes in other places: Tokyo, Vienna, Oslo, and much of the States, each due fully to an artistic merit all of their own.”

Yet despite the global nature of sound art culture, “the Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin sounds are distinct from one another,” according to Hamilton. “Each place definitely has its own thing going, and it’s easy to recognise points in time and people that are key to that sound. At the Lines of Flight festival of experimental music and film in Dunedin last October, the Dunedin acts seemed to play for quite a long time, whereas all the Auckland acts were really short, with distinct, almost rushed pieces. It felt like big city syndrome versus sleepy small town syndrome”

However the scenes aren’t quite as insular as they once were, particularly due to the internet. “With the current climate being extremely open to resources, technology and information, the floodgates of influence are much wider,” says Hamilton. “When the South Island was going through its major times of musical growth, availability was a big issue, whereas now you can pretty much download the most obscure Venezuelan psychedelic musique concrète as quick as it is to run a Google search, click the download button, and begin listening. The result, I think, is that although there’s a very connected scene of people, their work varies much more. We’re not bound together by familiar musical aesthetics, but more bound together through mutual appreciation of a wider palette of music.”

These factors have also helped to shatter the boundaries between New Zealand’s distinct experimental music movements: the rigorously academic school of sound art and the outsider/avant-rock scene. Aesthetically, many of Auckland’s sound artists seem to have more in common with electroacoustic pioneers like Douglas Lilburn than they do with the outsider rock of Xpressway bands like Dead C. However, Hamilton sees such comparisons as misguided.

“Rosy Parlane and Lovely Midget are the next generation of what Dead C were involved with,” he says. “They share far more in common than post-Lilburn electronic music. In fact, Dead C have probably drawn more influence from Lilburn's electronic music than most of the academic world Lilburn inhabited.

“I think it’s easier to say that the two camps are defined this way: the ones that are part of the giant musically cross-pollinating world, and those rarefied ones that isolate themselves from anything that isn’t what they’re doing.”

Hamilton himself isn’t isolated, choosing to interact with other artists as frequently as possible. When I caught up with Sam for the interview, he’d just flown back from an event in Melbourne, and was about to head to a film shoot. Hamilton’s busy schedule has a lot to do with what he describes as “the social role music plays with both our society and the individual.”

“Through making music I have had the chance to meet a lot of fantastic people from all over the world, and music plays the role of the glue that binds that community together,” says Hamilton. “Being an artist has opened up many doors for me both personally as an individual, and culturally: being able to travel, meet people, and see places. It’s the main tool I use to guide myself through this world.”

“The great thing I find about the people in this scene, here and in many other places, is they’re rather unpretentious,” says Hamilton. On face value, this may seem like an odd statement. A lot of the sound art being produced in Auckland is incredibly cerebral, playing with interdisciplinary techniques and challenging the audience’s aesthetic boundaries. It’s no wonder that many people consider sound art to be overly pretentious. But when you attend an event at the Wine Cellar, you can see what Hamilton means.

“Most of the people are themselves. It’s not a particularly rewarding scene to be in if you have ambitions of being a rock star – electroacoustic improv won’t make you any money, won’t make you famous and certainly won’t get you laid. So most people are really down to earth and approachable.”

So if Sam Hamilton isn’t in it for the money or the girls, what is driving him?

“As for what I want to achieve, that’s a question I’m more interested in. There is a certain level of mystery in why I make music that I will never be able to understand, and I hope I never do. Making music for me is fulfilling. Sometimes I can understand what it is that is getting 'filled', sometimes not.”

But then again, it’s not about understanding. It’s about listening.

For more information:

Tumbling Strain mailing list (tumblingstrain.mail@gmail.com)